Midnight Honor

nearly kill you.”
    “You were enraged, and I did not move out of your way fast enough, an error I will not make again, you can be sure.”
    “I thought you were dead,” she whispered. “All that time, when I did not hear from you, I thought I had killed you.”
    “The first two weeks, I thought you had, too. MacCardle tells me I was out of my mind with the fever. Then, when I recovered”—he paused and kissed her again, tightening his arms around her so that she was encouraged to slide over and lie directly on top of him—“I was told you were in prison, and there was little that could be done to set you free. I damn near lost my mind again.”
    Anne folded her arms across his chest and propped her chin on her hands, content just to look at him, content to feel his hands stroking up and down her back. They had spent thebetter part of the last ten days in bed, most of it sleeping, eating,
bathing
, sleeping. Angus slipped away now and then to oversee the repairs to Moy Hall, for the English had come back several times during Anne's incarceration and there was hardly a chair without its stuffing ripped open or a cupboard not smashed to kindling. Most of the servants had returned when they heard the laird had somehow miraculously won his lady's freedom. There were also two hundred clansmen camped around the loch, with more appearing every day, many of them MacGillivray and MacBean men who had no homes left to go to and no one to lead them. Of the twenty-one lairds of Clan Chattan who had stood in the front line alongside MacGillivray, only three had survived the charge, and two of those had died later of their wounds.
    The clansmen who found their way to Moy were still some of the fiercest fighters who had taken to the field that day, and with Anne standing proud by his side, Angus declared that he would have need of every one of them in the weeks and months to come. There were a thousand fugitives hiding in the hills who would need food and clothing and transportation out of Scotland, and MacGillivray's men were the best smugglers in Caledonia. The English were systematically stripping the Highlands of cattle, sheep, and livestock, hoping to starve the people into submission, but to an exceptional band of reivers and rustlers, what was stolen once could easily be stolen twice.
    Angus had received word the previous afternoon from his solicitor that Anne's pardon had arrived safely in his office, along with affidavits from the three royal ministers to whom Angus had shown the forged battle orders. Cumberland had immediately destroyed the copy Angus had taken from Major Worsham's pouch, but the gesture had been theatrical at best, petulant at worst. On its own, there was nothing to prove the order false. But there had indeed been other papers in Worsham's possession, including copious notes taken during the meeting with Cumberland, when it was explained how easy it had been to forge Lord George's signature and add the clause that had led to such unjustified, unconscionable slaughter. Angus had gone to London himself to present the evidence to the First Minister, and to name the only terms onwhich he would not send copies of all the documentation to the
London Gazette
.
    In the days following the battle at Culloden, Cumberland had been regarded as a valiant hero; he had triumphed over the savagery of a Highland army twenty thousand strong! He had saved England! He had saved his father's crown!
    But then, as the stories of the hangings and brutalities began to seep south, the papers were less enthusiastic in their praise. Prince Frederick of Hesse had returned home with an entire army that had refused to fight under such a “butcher,” and the people were appalled to learn the reason why. They were also becoming curious to know why, out of the thirty-five hundred rebels currently imprisoned in the Highlands, so few had actually been taken on the field that day.
    Angus was in a position to give further eyewitness accounts of the total lack of compassion and honor and the needless cruelty to the dying and wounded; that, plus evidence of the duke's complicity in forging false battle orders, would turn the hero into a beast overnight. The triumph would become a shameful disgrace, and in the backlash of sympathy, both in England and abroad, the Scots might well emerge in a stronger position to challenge the throne than before.
    In return for his silence on the matter, Angus demanded Anne's immediate release from